St. Louis Browns

The St. Louis Cardinals, though the Show-Me State’s favorites, have been called the most hated team in baseball. However, another St. Louis baseball club has been considered the most unlovable team in history.

In 1902, Major League Baseball had only sixteen teams, and of those, only two teams played west of the Mississippi: the beloved St. Louis Cardinals and the notorious St. Louis Browns.

The two teams of the Gateway City shared a stadium, Sportsman’s Park at 2911 N. Grand Boulevard. The dark green monster of a ballpark was constructed in 1920 when carriage-maker Robert Lee Hedges became owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, moved the franchise to St. Louis, and named them the Browns. Although they shared a home field and city, the two teams couldn’t be further apart.

In 1926, the Cardinals won the World Series and became hometown heroes. In fact, the Cardinals won three World Series and four National League Pennants in the 1940s and have won the most World Series championships out of any team in the National League.

The hapless Browns, however, usually finished last in the American League and became known by locals as the team that was “first in shoes, first in booze, and last in the American League,” a reference to the city’s numerous shoe factories and breweries. Brown Shoes and 150 other shoe factories were headquartered there and breweries included Anheuser-Busch, Falstaff, Griesedieck Bros., St. Vrain, Cherokee, Lemp, Bavarian, and about forty others.

The Cardinals usually filled Sportsman’s Park to its capacity of about 30,500, while the Browns were lucky to draw a mere 2,000 fans to the stadium.

Most of the Browns were known as brawlers, drunks, and jokers. They were a mess. Once in Boston, some of the players dropped firecrackers from their hotel windows on pedestrians below. The team’s catcher in their only World Series appearance in 1944, Frank Mancuso, had injured his neck in a parachute jump during his years in the army. When he would look up to catch a foul ball, the oxygen would cut off to his brain, and he would pass out.

One of their most devious episodes occurred in 1910. It was October 9, and Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb had a comfortable lead over Napoléon “Nap” Lajoie of the Cleveland Naps for the batting title, so Cobb took the last day of the season off. However, Cleveland was facing off against the Browns in a double header, and Browns manager Jack O’Connor and coach Harry Howell hated Ty Cobb because Ty was surly and slid into bases with his steel spikes held high.

So, the two had third baseman Red Corriden play back on the grass, which allowed Lajoie to beat out four bunts. When Lajoie bunted a fifth time, the official scorer ruled that he had reached on an error by Corriden. O’Connor and Howell pleaded with the official scorekeeper, a woman, to change it to a hit for the Lajoie, and when she refused, they tried to bribe her by promising to buy her a new wardrobe. She stood her ground, though, and Cobb beat Lajoie for the batting title by a few thousandths of a point.

The next day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote: “All St. Louis is up in arms over the deplorable spectacle, conceived in stupidity and executed in jealousy.” When American League President Ban Johnson heard about the incident, he insisted the Browns fire O’Connor and Howell, and both men were informally banned from baseball for life.

Paul Krichell St. Louis Browns

Catcher Paul Krichell played for the St. Louis Browns in 1911 and 1912. He went on to be a revered scout for the New York Yankees.

The Philip Ball Era

Things changed for the Browns in 1916.

That year Hedges sold the team to Philip Ball, who ushered in a new era for the ragtag outfit. Ball had the money to buy star players, and under his leadership, the Browns were contenders throughout most of the 1920s.

In 1922, the Browns had an all-star roster that included George Sisler, Ken Williams, Baby Doll Jacobson, and Jack Tobin. That year, the team almost beat the Yankees in the pennant race, losing on the last day of the season, and left fielder Ken Williams became the first player in MLB history to hit thirty home runs and steal thirty bases in a single season. George Sisler went on be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Known as Gorgeous George, Gentleman George, and the Sizzler, Sisler joined the team in 1915 as a pitcher but quickly switched to first base. In the 1920 season, he had 257 hits and drove in 122 runs. Sisler hit in forty-one consecutive games—a record that was only broken when Joe Dimaggio hit in fifty-six consecutive games in 1941.

Sisler passed away in 1973, but he lived long enough to see the Browns win their only American League Pennant and his two sons, Dave and Dick, play in the major leagues during the 1950s. Even the rival St. Louis Cardinals honored Sisler by erecting a statue of him outside Busch Stadium in 2001.

Although Sisler was a star player in the Browns’ best years, he wasn’t the only hall-of-famer to wear brown and white in St. Louis. Bobby Wallace played for the team from 1902 to 1917, and Rogers Hornsby managed the Browns from 1933 to 1937, though he was inducted to the hall of fame for being a standout player for the Cards.

St. Louis Browns 2

A Browns runner slides to rst in a 1935 game against the Boston Red Sox.

The Depression

Although he was the club’s best owner, Philip Ball made a couple of mistakes in his time in the MLB. First, he fired General Manager Branch Rickey, who went to work for the Cardinals, building the team’s farm system that produced the winning teams of the 1940s. Next, he made a cruelly incorrect prediction.

In 1925, Ball remodeled Sportsman’s Park and added twelve thousand seats. He predicted there would be a World Series in St. Louis in 1926, and his extra seats would be needed. His prediction came true, but it was the Cardinals and Yankees that filled the stadium, not the Browns.

After their Roaring Twenties glory, the Browns hit a rough patch during the Great Depression and continually churned dismal record after dismal record throughout the 1930s. In 1933, the Browns starting setting low-attendance records, and they finished in last place, losing ninety-six games. That same year, Philip Ball died, and his estate was left to run the team.

The 1935 season was even worse as they competed for fans with the Cardinals’ Gashouse Gang, a nickname shortstop Leo Durocher gave them in 1934 because their uniforms were filthy and smelled of the gas that was used for lighting in St. Louis. The Browns only had eighty-one thousand in attendance for the entire season. And just when it seemed it could not get darker, they only won forty-three games in 1939 and finished sixty-four games out of first place. The pitching staff had an earned run average of 6.01.

In 1941, Don Barnes, who bought the team from the Ball estate in 1936, decided he could not make a dime with the franchise as it was, so he planned to move the Browns from St. Louis to Los Angeles. Approval from the league seemed certain, and a meeting of league members was planned for December 8, 1941. Then, the attack on Pearl Harbor happened—just one day prior to the scheduled meeting. Questioning the problems of wartime travel, the league denied permission to move the team, and the St. Louis Browns would be in the Gateway City for at least a little while longer.

Lefty Mills St. Louis Browns

The years between 1927 and 1943 were abysmal; the team only turned out two winning records over those sixteen years. But in 1944, a miracle happened.

The Browns won the American League Pennant and would face their cotenants, the Cardinals, in an all-St. Louis World Series. It was the first and last time the Browns would be in a World Series, and the last time where both teams in the series shared a field.

However, getting to the World Series was not easy. Back then, there was no playoff system like there is today; the two most-winning teams just faced off against each other in the World Series. To be crowned American League champions, the Browns had to sweep the Yankees in a four-game series, the last of the season, in order to come out one game ahead of the Detroit Tigers.

Against the odds, however, they won the first three games and needed only a win the final day of the season to clinch the pennant. However, the Browns could not start their star pitcher, Denny Galehouse, for game four. Galehouse only pitched on Sundays because he worked at Goodyear Aircraft in Akron, Ohio, during the week and took a train on weekends to wherever the Browns were playing. The team usually played double-headers on Sunday, so he could pitch the first game and catch a train back to Akron.

“I wouldn’t say Jakucki was an alcoholic, but he drank a lot,” Galehouse once said.

On the night before the big game, the Browns' starting pitcher entered the hotel lobby with a brown bag in hand. But he assured his teammates that he would not drink that night. The next morning one of the Browns’ trainers smelled whiskey on his breath and questioned Jakucki on his promise.

“I promised not to drink last night,” Jakucki reportedly answered, “but I didn’t say anything about this morning.”

Despite Jakucki’s morning libations, the Browns clinched the title on the last day of the season with the help of a home run by Chet Laab, who was best-known for striking out against pitcher Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians when Feller set the record for eighteen strikeouts in a row.

When the Browns faced the Cardinals in the World Series, it was a close one. The team split home field advantage but never changed stadiums, and despite a valiant effort, the Cardinals took home the title, one of their eleven World Series championships, in six games

St. Louis Browns 3

A Browns runner slides to rst in a 1935 game against the Boston Red Sox.

The Last Antics

After losing the World Series to the Cardinals in 1944, Barnes sold the Browns to businessman Richard Muckerman, and the team reverted back to its losing ways, ushering in an era when the team would become more well-known for its antics than its ball-playing.

In 1945, they recruited one-armed Pete Gray who hit .218 and drove in thirteen runs. Having lost an arm in a childhood accident, Gray learned to field the ball, stick his glove under his stub of a left arm, and extract the ball with his right hand. He played center field during the game, but before the game, he would practice in the infield and show the crowd how fast he could throw the ball. His inability to catch and return the ball quickly enough cost the Browns some games, and he only played one season with the team.

In 1947, the colorful ex-Cardinal Dizzy Dean became the announcer for the Browns games and his abuse of the English language brought down the fury of educators who said he was having an adverse influence on young people. He returned to the mound for the Browns once, too. During the final game of the 1947 season, he pitched four shut-out innings but retired with a pulled muscle.

Ownership changed hands again in 1951 when Bill Veeck bought the club. Known as the former owner of the Cleveland Indians, Veeck had a reputation for outlandish antics and colorful showmanship that both entertained and outraged fans. In his inaugural year as owner, Veeck signed little person Eddie Gaedel to the team. Standing three feet, seven inches tall, and weighing about sixty-five pounds, Gaedel stepped up to the plate on August 19, 1951 and was walked on four straight pitches, then replaced by a pinch runner. The next day, American League president Will Harridge banned Gaedel from playing.

However, these antics were just the last glimmers of an era that was quickly coming to an end. Veeck was eventually pushed out as the majority owner by part-owners whose first priority was to move the team. St. Louis could no longer sustain two ball teams.

The St. Louis Browns played their last game at Sportsman’s Park on September 27, 1953. After that, they moved to Baltimore to become the Orioles, and the owners sold Sportsman’s Park to August “Gussie” Busch Jr., the president of Anheuser-Busch and owner of the Cardinals, who renamed the stadium after himself. It was truly the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.

Despite the city’s die-hard enthusiasm for Cardinals baseball, the Browns have not been forgotten in St. Louis. Dedicated to the preservation of the history of the team, a St. Louis Browns fan club and historical society was organized in 1984, and it currently has more than three hundred members. Today, the St. Louis Browns Historical Society hosts an annual dinner and a blog where old-timers can share their allegiance to the team that never won a World Series. The society also produces a full color magazine and sells caps, uniforms, and other reproductions of Brownie memorabilia. Memberships start at $30 per year. Visit thestlbrowns.com.